A portal or portal web site is at the forefront of today's web technology and is the next generation of desktop. A portal web site may have one or more portlets, which display content items, such as, news, search engines. A portlet is a portable building block or a web component that can be installed into other portal web sites. Often the content items displayed in such portlets are managed by different content management systems. Thus, each time a developer wants to create a new portlet for a portal web site, the developer has to create a portlet application from scratch in order to be able to connect to the content items managed in such content management systems for a given project. As such, developing such a portlet application can be quite complicated and labor intensive. Further, developing such a portlet application can be time consuming and expensive. Moreover, given that developers have different levels of skill sets, may lead to the creation of portlet applications with different approaches, thus, affecting the quality of these portlets.